Boys’ club

I often wonder why there are so few women mixing it up on atheist sites or running atheist and related sites themselves. Are they all too busy working the double shift, or what?

I thought of one possible reason today, and that is that (to my ever-renewed surprise) lots of men still think it’s hip and funny to be sexist. Then if a woman says it’s not, a lot of them think it’s hip and funny to be sexist some more by way of reply. Then the woman decides she doesn’t want any more of this crap, so she stops visiting the site in question – and it becomes even more of a boys’ club than it already was.

That’s a bad thing, in my view. It repels women from places they would otherwise like to go, and it makes such places woman-free, not because women just aren’t interested in the subject matter, but because (some) women dislike chronic sexism and won’t subject themselves to it. Lots of people would probably say they should just toughen up then – but that’s not it. It’s not about not being tough enough – it’s not about being a sensitive plant, or feeble and whiny, or too good for this world. It’s about just not wanting to deal with stupid mindless retrograde contempt from random strangers.

It’s still the case, or maybe even more the case, that ways of talking that would be obviously outrageous coming from white people talking to non-white people are just routine and ordinary coming from men talking to women. I persist in finding that odd. Lots of people find it not odd at all. This is depressing.

There are a few sites that I used to like but don’t visit any more, just because I don’t feel like getting patronizing crap from idiots who think they get to patronize me because they have penises (one each, as far as I know). That’s tiresome.

108 Responses to “Boys’ club”

I also find it odd that sexist comments are accepted where racist, antisemitic or homophobic comments would not be. The only solution that I can see, if there is a solution, is for women and males who oppose sexism to complain, to refuse to accept sexist remarks, even if we are considered by “cool” sexist commentators as old-fashioned, preachy or puritanical. I’m not sure how it got to be hip in certain circles to be sexist: how did that come to be? In the male mind, there seems to be the idea that in the end women pardon everything, mommy loves you even if you’re a boy bad, perhaps especially because you’re a bad boy. That’s not always true, and women online are not talking to their 5 year-old male children, of course or perhaps they are often talking to 5 year-old male children, 5 years old in terms of emotional development, that is.

It is a shame. Women have a lot to say on issues. At least as much as men. I remember the thing a while back with the toothy one being harangued, apparently, because she’s a bit of a looker. There’s not enough female voices of rationality out there.

I wonder how Madelaine Bunting or that Armstrong person deals with it? I mean, they’re sure to receive sexist claptrap, but worse, they actively support religions that are patriarchal to the core. That must chafe.

The rise of blue humor for my generation is hard to wrangle with. I know, for example, that “Family Guy” is funny to scumbags like me because the blue humor indicates a moral wrong, and because I think the writers had communication of that moral wrong in mind when they think the stuff up. By putting it out there front-and-center, we laugh, because it’s unnerving. But then you have people who adopt the blue humor as a habit, they don’t show any signs of recognizing the taboo they’re flouting. Catharsis and cathexis, donchakno.

Anyway this is one of the background problems which causes tensions to escalate in the way you describe. But I’d think it’s more prominent in local cultures that adopt an extremely playful attitude towards debate. You know, as opposed to here where it’s kind of playful seriousness, or at Toothdom where it’s serious seriousness.

Here is what I hate about boys club/locker room comments on sites and blogs that (used to) interest me or seem important. Beyond the pure offensive sexism, that is. Comments about someone’s fantasized alluring body or hairdo, or snippy-ass posts about someone’s pissy mood or chip on the shoulder shut down any other discussion. They move things away from the interesting topic down into the area of low functioning. What if I want to read comments about the real topic or learn something? Sorry, someone w/a penis and his snickering buddies have distracted the audience. Where I want to read smart thoughfilled comments, I find belching, crotch scratching, and hooting. I don’t want that shit around the house. It really stinks.

I have contended with this issue all my life, at work and at play. I’m among those who leave, since being exposed to knuckle-dragging is neither a learning nor a character-building experience, and my time and stamina are limited.

Yes sexism still seems fairly common in the blogosphere. I’m not sure if the racism comparison works though – perhaps it does, but there’s still a fair bit of racist and homophobic crap – especially the latter – on supposedly rationalist sites (usually those of a conservative bent)… given that disagreements between commenters often devolve into insults, and given that female commenters are often easily identifiable (in a way that black/gay etc. commenters are not), it makes sexism an easier ploy. Either way, it’s all too pervasive. I think men would do well to call out this bullshit when we see it as well, rather than leaving it for women… that might at least help reduce the appearance of a boys’-club effect.

It strikes me as especially offensive when atheists who routinely (and correctly!) criticize the special privileges and immunity to criticism religion enjoys prove to be utterly blind to the special privileges and immunity to criticism that *they* enjoy for their own privileged status or statuses, whatever those may be – male, white, socioeconomic class, etc. I know privilege blindness is a universal phenomenon, but DAMN! Some people are in dire need of a rectal craniotomy. I happen to enjoy practicing that particular procedure, but not enough to slog through comments in even the theoretically more enlightened reaches of the blogosphere. I rarely contribute anywhere but here because the conversations generally aren’t interesting enough for me to want to participate.

(Which strikes me as an excellent occasion to issue another hearty thankyouthankyouthankyou to OB for runnin’ such a tight ship hereabouts!)

I’ve long lamented the small percentage of women to interact with in secular/atheist venues. It’s something many atheist meetup groups (online or in real life) have remarked on, too, and nobody’s come up with a compelling set of answers that I’ve seen.

I have noticed what OB has – even in circles where it would be a terrible faux pas to make a racist or homophobic joke, sexism seems much more common. That definitely explains some of the problem.

It doesn’t explain all of it, though (and I know you didn’t suggest that it did, Ophelia). I speculate about a few possibilities – mind you, these are generalizations, and I make no claim to being right, or any claim to why they might be so, if they’re so. Feel free to wallop me if I’m a dunce.

For whatever reasons, I have noticed that many men – on average, and really, without regard to sexual orientation – seem to take a more confrontational, direct conversational approach. Conversely, in general, and by no means universally, I’ve noticed that many women – also without regard to sexual orientation – tend to take a less confrontational and direct approach. I suspect sometimes the direct, “loud male” approach, combined with the sexism Ophelia noted, might have something to do with why so many women say “piss off” to these forums.

There are notable exceptions. I dare say you’re one of them, Ophelia. In my experience (only anecdotally), you’re one of the less common women who takes a conversational point and hashes it out directly and without rhetorical compromise. You’re not the only one, of course, but I do find it less common in my personal experience. It’s one of the things I’ve always like and admired about you. Not because I have some gendered idea about how men and women “ought” to behave, but because I prefer direct, non-euphemistic, and passionate, argumentation.

I can cite many examples to the contrary, but from what I’ve observed, they seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule. If my observations have any validity (and they might not), I suspect that’s why women like Ophelia get labeled as “bitches” or “shrews,” when they’re only stating just exactly what a man who shared those opinions would state himself. It infuriates me to see women put down as as “aggressive” or “shrill” when a man who spoke exactly the same thing, in exactly the same style, would be lauded as an “incisive, uncompromising commentator.”

It infuriates me to see women put down as as “aggressive” or “shrill” when a man who spoke exactly the same thing, in exactly the same style, would be lauded as an “incisive, uncompromising commentator.”

Josh: I think the punishment for assertive women is precisely why in some contexts you don’t see women using that style. I don’t think women dislike confrontational styles per se. Rather, I think there are spaces where women feel safe to be assertive and spaces where they don’t.I do know of plenty of blogs written by assertive, argumentative females; these are usually dedicated feminist blogs with largely female readerships. I think women often dislike male-dominated confrontational blogs because they don’t seem like places hospitable to assertive women. The thing about “confrontational” blogs is that they’re usually confrontational against a shared bete noire of the blogger and commenters, whether it’s religion or patriarchy or Republicans or Democrats or what-have-you. It’s fun to be confrontational if you and a bunch of others are all confronting a common enemy. But it’s no fun to be confrontational with a bunch of people who are all ganging up on you and using bigoted slurs to do it. Plenty of male-dominated blogs are obviously the kind of place where an assertive woman saying something unpopular would get hit with all kinds of borderline-sexist sneers and jeers.

What Josh said. I was going to say something along those lines, but he said it better (must be because he’s a man and I’m a woman ;-)) . . .

I notice that males still dominate in the hallowed halls of philosophy and politics at the uni where I study, and they are inherently passionately argued subjects. The line-up at a recent philosophy conference in Melbourne was dominated by men. I’m doing an elective in psychology at the moment where my fellow students are mostly women by a significant majority, and it’s considered rude to disagree in my tutorial (which means I’ve pretty much alienated everyone except the tutor).

I think in general women are less confrontational than men, whether that’s nature, nurture or both. I’ve been called “masculine” (or ruder things along the same lines) many times for my tendency to engage in debate. I would say atheism by its nature is a confrontational position to take, as it only exists to oppose theism, so it makes sense that if women are less directly confrontational, there’d be less women who are outspoken atheists.

Personally, I haven’t been subjected to sexism on the atheist blogosphere: is there a particular incident or site you’re thinking of, OB?

The atheist movement currently appears to be dominated by white males. Some explanations that I’ve seen basically argue that it’s because white males have enough social status that they can afford to publicly associate themselves with an unpopular cause like atheism. It seems plausible to me that this could play a role. Many of them wouldn’t be aware of this privilege either.

@Parrhesia: a common pattern that I have seen, on blogs like Pharyngula and elsewhere, is that a woman would point out a sexist remark. Some will respond with reasons why that wasn’t really sexist, or wasn’t really that bad, but there is another, really annoying type of argument that you’ll commonly see. It goes something like this: We don’t want to bow to Christians who claim offense when we criticize and make fun of religion, so why should we listen to women who claim offense when we make fun of women?

Problem is, that these situations are not equivalent. I don’t think I have to explain here why (and I don’t have the time right now anyway, sorry) – but this type of argument keeps coming up, and can derail entire threads.

I’ve a fairly good idea of the specific example Ophelia’s alluding to there, but could somebody link to or otherwise describe some other examples of sexism on atheist blogs? I’m not disputing the claim at all, I’d just like a better idea of the kind of comment people are talking about.

Most writers of blogs that the readers of B&W would visit are white (upper)middle class Anglosaxon men. That means that they have led a life of unquestioned privilege and deference. By designating themselves progressives (and being so, possibly, in a single domain), they do not see the need to question their own attitudes or those of others further. Women figure very little, if at all, in their political/philosophical agendas and making fun of them and their concerns makes them appear unshackled by “PC hysteria and rigidity”.

I’ve started a note and then deleted it about ten times now… Maybe this one gets posted!

I’d like to second Ian MacDougall’s point about Ophelia’s role in the dicussions here on B&W. She initiates and moderates, and she also contributes. The latter is vital, I think, if we’re going to discuss at all. I very seldom comment on Pharyngula, for example, because PZ just lets comments happen, by and large, and so much is simply empty space that it doesn’t encourage contributions – at least not mine.

Of course, the general problem that Ophelia raises, about the sexist comments and innuendo – and I think I know the site she has in mind too – is no doubt real, though I think a bigger problem is the sheer volume of stupidity that weighs down most discusion threads. Sure, there are boys being boys and smearing faeces all over their faces, and that’s annoying, but it’s the sheer, petty stupidity that gets to me.

AC Grayling says somewhere (and others have doubtless said it too) that the internet is the biggest lavatory wall in history – so you’re bound to find lots of idiots (and sexist idiots too) writing on it. But, you know, anyone who gets his kicks pretending to be transgressive on a lavatory wall just has to be pathetic as a human being.

On a tanget. Nice to have Tric here. You know, Tric, way back, when the world was young, and I had just started off to university. I was afraid to open my mouth, and then I thought, “I’ll never learn anything this way,” and I haven’t shut up since (as some on B&W will testify!). I’ve shown my ignorance lots of times, and almost always learned something when I did. Everytime Ophelia makes me back down, I learn something, and sometimes I even remember what I learned.

@Eric MacDonald: Thanks! Deen has said much the same thing, which is why I’m finally commenting. :) And I’m commenting here because I’ve found it to be a bit more welcoming and less like I’m going to vanish in the throng.

I’m a young man, and I completely agree with this article. I’ve ventured into obscure corners of the internet where racist slurs are acceptable to the point of being thought “funny”. The more I complained about them, the more they were used.

So that’s annoying, but the scary thing about the sexist equivalent is that it’s considered funny in places which are not obscure corners of the internet, such as mainstream newspaper sites or social networking sites.

I shouldn’t prematurely distance myself from these sexist men, because I’m probably guilty of some of what they do, e.g. flirting when I’m supposed to be debating. But I do think it’s a shame that we have this tendency either to be surprised by, or sceptical of, articulate women who apparently share our intellectual interests.

It’s wrong in principle, but I also find it personally disappointing, because (having grown up with two sisters) I’ve always preferred being in the company of a mixture of men and women, in all contexts. Sexist comments spoil things for people like me, as well as for the women they’re addressed to.

Anyway, just thought I’d try and give you hope by pointing out that not all of us think it’s okay to exclude women from these things.

Damn. I follow about 10 atheist blogs with Google Reader. Now I have to hunt down the sexist post and see what this is all about.

I’ve been reading PZ and 9 others (including OB’s wonderful site here!) for about a year and I find them more or less _better_ than the average tech, science, or political blogs with regards to the -ism problem. Not “cured”, but better. And about ten thousand times better than reddit or 4chan.

Was it a blog post, or a comment? Was it a known figure, or some random person like myself? What was the reaction in the comments to the sexist post? I find it a little hard without context… well, off to the hunt for sexist-athiest posts!

Right on Ben! You’re right. I like it when the human race is there. Hate the assumed masculine-feminine polarity, especially when we’re trying to find the truth.

Tric. If you take part here, you won’t get lost in the shuffle. That’s one of the great things about B&W. Ophelia takes us seriously, until we go seriously off the rails. That helps. And sexist claptrap is not ignored. It’s faced head on. Racist claptrap too.

The obvious problem is that the blogosphere is nothing more than a reflection of society at large, and in many circles sexist humor is still the norm. Add the anonymity factor and it’s easy to see why some consider it open season. Someone mentioned Pharyngula and derailment, and I’ve seen that more than once. Sexism is pointed out and commenters appear out of the woodwork to explain why it really wasn’t sexist, and everything spirals downwards.

One of the most well known examples might be the “PMS bitch” comment posted by the execrable John Kwok at The Intersection. In the dumbest justification ever, on any subject, he claimed he wasn’t being sexist because they were the lyrics to a song, so we should take it up with the songwriter if there were complaints. After a lot of complaints Mooney finally deleted the comment.

As a scientist and a writer, I interact with many “progressive” groups. Sexism, and not just as unconscious bias, is prevalent in all of them: science fiction writers, space exploration/SETI enthusiasts and practitioners, transhumanists, futurists. The leaders are perpetually self-selected white (upper-)middle class Anglosaxon men.

1. We can’t have population quota representation, because this is all about superior quality/qualifications that non-males and non-whites simply lack. Or: Women and other Others simply aren’t interested in the high concepts of (fill in blank) espoused here. Too busy birthin’ babies and battin’ eyelashes.

2. Would you rather we included token women and minorities?

3. My wife/girlfriend/mistress/concubine is a feminist and/or non-white and she agrees with me.

4. Your humorless PC hysteria alienates those who would support you if only you were polite.

If the Other persists, the veneer of liberalism falls off and abuse of the baboon variety commences. And the more qualified a woman is, the worse the abuse is, to put her in her place.

Thanks for all the compliments to B&W. I get quality commenters here! Which reflects well on B&W but also on the quality commenters.

But of course it’s also because B&W is not as huge as Pharyngula or the Dawkins site. Both of those attract the kind of thing I was talking about, just as a feature of their traffic rather than their ethos. In other words neither PZ nor Richard is a fan of sexism, to put it mildly.

I can spare people the searching (in case anyone is still at it), because the discussion has taken a better direction: it was at last week’s Jesus and Mo. There are lots of fan boys there and some of them like to ignore what the barmaid said (which is all there is to the barmaid – words) and go straight to discussing her fuckability. On one level this is a “joke” – but “jokes” like that are never on just one level, and on another level it’s just a way of telling all women “nobody cares what you think, shut up and spread your legs.” This seems to me to be simply the secular version of religious laws that tell women to shut up and stay in the house with the babies. J and M deserves much better than that.

Yes, I thought so. Usually I just read the cartoon, but for some reason I peeked at the comments this time, but by then the moment had passed. What makes this kind of stupid response so objectionable is that in fact, words are not all there is to the barmaid. It’s her acute, sardonic mind that is so noticeable, contrasted with the holy mindlessness of Jesus and Mo. To reduce that penetrating mind simply to body is really offensive.

Some great comments on this thread. I love the web when you get high powered intellects disecting serious issues. I agree with pretty much all said here, and I think Eric’s spot on about the barmaid. Instead of noticing the rapier wit and intelligence pitted against the patriachal bafoon’s, we have minimization.

Well, I personally think there’s a bit of a double standard here. I brush off statements about “men” or “all men” or similar statements (there’s some in the comments above) that could be interpreted as sexist (against males, obviously) routinely without complaining about sexism. On the other hand, at least a few women are willing to blow the most slightly awkward comment about women into base misogyny. It’s about as hard for me to take some complaints/accusations of sexism seriously in the same way I often have trouble taking comparisons of politicians to Hitler seriously. They’re frequent enough and often frivolous enough that at this point I’ve lost all perspective on what should qualify as sexism, at least in print.

Yes, I know, I don’t get it because I’m a man, and I’m a knuckle-dragging troglodyte, and I’m oppressing women just by mentioning the fact that I don’t even know what constitutes oppressing women any more.

For a little perspective, I once mentioned to a friend’s girlfriend that I didn’t understand why it’s such a cultural imperative that women shave their legs. She was a very level-headed girl, not really the makeup type. She was in med school for oncology and working in a cancer research laboratory. One of the last people I would think would be caught up in such parochial cultural niceties. You know what she said at the thought of women not shaving their legs? “Eww.” Can men be forgiven for not being aware of what constitutes sexism when it doesn’t even seem to be too clear among women?

Dan L.: your message is full of fail. Others can dissect it further, if they want. I’m just going to address this bit:

“Can men be forgiven for not being aware of what constitutes sexism when it doesn’t even seem to be too clear among women?”

Yes, but only once. You’ve clearly had people try and explain it to you already, and you still don’t get it. But after a while, people will stop being forgivable and start to consider the possibility that you don’t want to understand it.

Dan, you seem to be saying so long as there are sexist women (like that friend of yours who thinks women who don’t shave are gross), you have no obligation to be non-sexist. Or to put it another way, you think women must be a monolith: you think “women” as a group have to be 100% sure what sexism is in all circumstances, and if they’re not, then you don’t need to bother being non-sexist.

This is crap. Sexism doesn’t mean “stuff that 100% of women object to.” It means judging a woman first and foremost by her sex, something that many women are indeed guilty of. Among people, men and women, who are concerned with fighting sexism, there is indeed a shared (though not 100% shared, as that is impossible) understanding of what sexism is. You can start there if you want to learn what sexism is and what you should do to avoid it. In the process, you might also learn why many women collaborate with sexism, and why many men oppose it. This may teach you not to assume that one woman’s sexist comment says something about all women or about sexism generally.

Generalizations about “men” as a group, while often sloppy, simply don’t have the same power or hurtfulness as generalizations about “women” as a group. This is because generalizations about “women” have actually been used to oppress women.

Dan, in order to address your first point, it’s important that you should do some work at distinguishing between double-standards (which is unacceptable) and a single standard that is sensitive to context (entirely acceptable). The standard everyone agrees on is “Don’t be sexist” (presumably you do too, though you admit confusion over how and when to apply it). As a means to that end, we entertain the standard, “Avoid generalizations by sex”.

You seem to think this rule is being overriden by a double-standard, i.e., “Avoid generalizations of women, do whatever you want with men”. But I think Jenavir has it right. There are relevant differences between the history of power between men and women that change the force that some speech-acts seem to normally have. And while generalizations are always sloppy, and to be avoided, the impact of one kind of generalization is usually more risky than the impact of another.

Still, if a generalization about men ran the risk of creating an oppressive effect, or is said in a context where it has such effects, then we ought to condemn it with the same vigor as we do when it happens to women. So long as we admit that, then we’re not holding a double-standard.

“I brush off statements about “men” or “all men” or similar statements (there’s some in the comments above) that could be interpreted as sexist…”

One difference between sexist remarks about men and sexist remarks about women, is that the remarks about women almost always involve sex. Whether they’re jokes, or office water-cooler talk, or whatever, derogatory remarks about women are almost always about the act of sex. This makes it a lot more personal and degrading. That’s just not true with remarks about men.

I notice however that he didn’t actually point out any ‘statements about “men”…that could be interpreted as sexist’ in the comments above – and just off the top of my head I don’t think there are any. So I’m not too worried about the double standard, pending further enlightenment.

It’s a bit like “spoing” at J and M pretending he can’t figure out that “one of us is sporting a teensy chip on her no doubt petite feminine shoulder” is sexist (in about eight different ways). I’m not talking about subtleties here.

It’s what Eric said. The point of the barmaid is her mind, and her willingness to use it. Ignoring that in order to talk about her fuckability (an invisible cartoon character for christ’s sake!) is as sexist as it gets.

I suppose the the main differences between atheism being offensive to believers, and sexism being offensive to women, hinges on:

a) atheists have good reason to believe that there is no god and that religion is an overall destructive force in the world, whereas sexists do not have good reason to believe women are intellectually inferior to men and should be cognizant that sexism has actually been a destructive force in the world;

b) womanhood is not some sort of choice or position to take (much like sexual orientation or race) that can be proselytised, whereas religious belief is to some extent potentially a matter of choice or is an explicit loudly defended choice, and is often forcibly proselytised.

So I would say that the offense of religious believers is an unfortunate corollary to the fact that it is imperative we stand up against the dangerous excesses of religion, and that the offense of religious believers isn’t something atheists should be gleeful about. It’s a shame that some people have taken the atheist movement as evidence that being offensive is now completely acceptable. I think there is an element of that in the wider culture, what with radio “shock-jocks” and certain comedians and artists making offense their stock-in-trade.

For the record, I haven’t noticed any flippant offense being metered out at B&W: the general atmosphere here is thoughtful, serious and impassioned, and jokes are normally self-deprecating or completely irreverent. It’s no wonder I need to get a daily B&W fix!

This is a little late in the thread but in view of Josh’s observation I would point out that Deborah Tannen has written extensively about differences in male and female styles of speech.

She cites a society in the Pacific where the women are blunt and direct and the men use indirection in speech. In that culture, bluntness is proof of womens’ inferiority. The men are subtle, diplomatic, sensitive etc. or so they claim. Women are crude.

She also observed that in mixed work settings women are caught in a double bind; they are ignored or thought weak if they use the “female” style and considered bitchy or aggressive if they

“Generalizations about “men” as a group, while often sloppy, simply don’t have the same power or hurtfulness as generalizations about “women” as a group. This is because generalizations about “women” have actually been used to oppress women.”

Sexism is the problem. It’s not only a problem when you’re reinforcing negative stereotypes about women, it’s a problem any time you think you can judge people based upon nothing but their gender. (Likewise the colour of their skin, sexual preferences, etc.) It doesn’t matter if it’s hurtful or laudatory, it doesn’t matter if they’re the underdog or top of the heap. Discussing which prejudiced remark is worse or which flavour of sexism is “bad enough” to eschew should be beneath us.

Sorry, CW, it’s not “beneath us” to notice real differences in practical effects. Because of historical and current power imbalances, slurs against women generally have a far worse effect than slurs against men. Likewise, “honky” doesn’t have anywhere near the vicious power as “nigger.”

That said, Benjamin is correct when he says:

Still, if a generalization about men ran the risk of creating an oppressive effect, or is said in a context where it has such effects, then we ought to condemn it with the same vigor as we do when it happens to women. So long as we admit that, then we’re not holding a double-standard.

Indeed. Usually when a generalization about men risks creating an oppressive effect, the generalization is about how men shouldn’t act “gay” or “girly,” and how gay/girly men can be insulted and treated poorly. E.g. the sort of mindset that leads horrified parents to snatch dolls out of their little boys’ hands, and to condemn sensitivity in boys in general.

“slurs against women generally have a far worse effect than slurs against men. Likewise, “honky” doesn’t have anywhere near the vicious power as “nigger.””

And I would say that participating in the notion that you can judge anyone on their “race” or gender is the root problem. That the effects of this idea have not been equally destructive does not change that at all. And for the record, I did not mean to say we must not “notice” the differences, I said that we should not be discussing which type or degree of sexism we abhor and which we let slide. Zero tolerance.

Really excellent discussion (excepting a bit of obnoxiousness on one contributor’s part). I wanted to say thanks to Jenavir and JuliaF for responding to my points and complicating the picture. I knew it couldn’t be as simplistic as I made it sound. Thanks for that!

I think this post is spot on – I’ve sometimes been put off posting on one popular politcal blog because of sexist comments. (I think it’s got a bit better recently so I won’t name it!) Once I complained and someone just responded ‘run along and make the tea love’. It struck me that if you transposed the whole exchange into a context of race that kind of comeback would have been unthinkable. It’s particularly alienating that the sexist comments are also quite often really quite unpleasant and misogynistic. I wouldn’t mind if someone made, say, an appreciative comment about a pretty woman – but instead it’s usually sneering comments about women who are fat, ugly, or old. One woman on the blog made a comment, I remember, and someone responded by making negative personal comments about the picture on her own blog. I’m willing to accept that more men than women are likely to comment on a political blog but I’m sure many women, like me, feel shy about contributing because of this culture of sexism.

In re: communication styles, Julia F noted the damned-either-way pushover or bitch “choice” women face with regards to workplace communications. I read a really interesting article about that a few years ago in the NY Times. It discussed some excellent experiments where exactly the same dialogue in a scene where a manager addresses a problem with a subordinate’s work is read by a man and a woman, and how subjects watching the scenes evaluated the manager – positively if a man, negatively if a woman, *no matter how the communication style of the dialogue was written*.

It was interesting social science research, and the article focused on the experiments and how the evidence supported the researchers’ hypothesis and eliminated competing hypotheses. Very good stuff.

And the article was published in the fucking ‘Fashion & Style’ section instead of the ‘Science’ section – because it was all about women, doncha know, and apparently the editors thought that only the women who read the Style section would be interested and the men who read the Science section wouldn’t be. ‘Cuz of the cooties, I imagine.

Why are women apparently silenced by obviously stupid remarks, that really hits the deliverer more than the recipient? As a man I can only presume. But, from personal experience, being bullied, treated as a lesser, basically minimized for whatever reason drives me up the wall and makes me think “Why the fuck am I putting up with this shit?” Sure, I can, and have put up with being treated as a pawn, if needs be, but why would I do it if I didn’t have to? This seems to me to be the problem. Women don’t have to put up with misogynistic rubbish, so why would they?

Other people might have less passionate, more rational explanations. :)

I’ve sometimes been put off posting on one popular politcal blog because of sexist comments. (I think it’s got a bit better recently so I won’t name it!)

I remember seeing the exchange, Sarah, and being extremely pissed off. I know and love that blog as a rule, so instead of leaving it and going elsewhere, I will take people to task for sexist remarks. I can even enjoy that as it gives me a chance to be grossly insulting, calling people sad wankers and the like.

However, there are times you can’t win, just as you can’t win against the derogatory or sexist remarks a guy or guys will make from passing cars. They find ineffectual rage funny. Just try not to let it spoil your day.

On the whole, the more right wing someone is, the more sexist they’ll be, going by blogs in the UK.

That sounds great: that insulting remarks hit the deliverer more than the recipient, but in reality they do hurt the recipient, especially when one comes to a forum or a dialogue expecting to be listened to, expecting to be recognized as an intelligent voice, expecting to be accepted as a peer or as an equal.

The motives for blogging are diverse. I think there are oodles of blogs with other attitudes than …”forum for dialogue”… :-)

Many have particular agendas, and what drives them is a genuine desire to persuade, rather than simply exchange ideas. And I am in fact inclined to think that many atheist blogs belong to this category, one way or another.

One can of course question if the strategy (and especially if it includes sexist slur) really is an efficint way to persuade.

Hi KB Player – and I seem to remember you also intervened in that discussion – thanks! I’m not *completely* sure about your point that the more right wing men are the more sexist they are – or perhaps it’s just the case that there is something *really* annoying about right on trendy wanker left wing types who are also sexist!

“Yet I am a bit puzzeled as to why sexist slur eventually have such profound impact, e.g. among B&W readers. Why are women apparently silenced by obviously stupid remarks, that really hits the deliverer more than the recipient?”

That’s what I was attempting to address with the bit about toughening up. It’s not about being silenced (am I silent?! not very!) – it’s about particular sites (and in the real world, places). It’s not that I’m “hurt” (as amos put it) – it’s that I just don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want to talk or discuss or socialize with people who think and talk that way – so I leave. Or rather – I fight back while that seems possible, and then when/if it becomes clear that I’m outnumbered and the host[s] are happy with the sexism, then I leave. It’s not about being a fragile bunny, it’s about ditching sites that are over-run by sexist jerks.

But then the wider issue is (for instance) that atheism seems to be even more of a guy thing. That’s an issue. But in my view it’s up to the sexist jerks and the hosts of sites to deal with that; it’s not up to me (except by being a noisy female atheist, and I don’t think I’ve been falling down on the job there).

Take what follows for the generalizations that it is, before you start objecting.

I think there are as many women atheists as men. The difference is that women usually just incorporate it in their way of thinking and acting, and go on with their business. Many men, especially when they were previously believers, wave it as an in-your-face banner at every possible occasion. It becomes part of cultural gender posturing — measuring length of belts by flinging them on the ground and daring others to step on them.

The few women who are as vocal as men get instantly tarred with the militant/shrill/bitch label and usually get picked upon for the style of their discourse, rather than its substance, till they go silent. As Johnson said:

“Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Now, that’s a strange thing: that fewer women are atheists than men. (My wife was an atheist long before I was.) After all, practically every religion is sexist, and most of them marginalise women in a big way. I’d be interested in some of the women’s reflections on this.

Also, I think it needs to be said that atheism, if it is largely a white male pheonomenon, is not a white anglo-saxon male phanomenon. Maybe on the English-speaking web, perhaps. But, there must be huge populations of male atheists in Europe, given the stats for non-belief in Europe.

Most of us who comment here probably visit a relatively small number of sites. Largely, they will be English, and will therefore no doubt be largely dominated by white anglo-saxon males, though I have the sense that the proportions are shifting slowly. But do we have any stats to go by here, or is the whole anglo-saxon male thing a matter of impressions?

If it’s only going by impressions, the atheist that I know best, and whose opinions I know best, is Ophelia. I’ve read all the usual stuff: Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Onfray, Mackie, Martin, Robinson, etc., but my online experience is pretty narrow, and I keep coming back to B&W most often, because I feel at home here, and the discussions tend to be serious, civilised and, at least reasonably, sensitive. People who tend to flare don’t last long. And people who play sexist tricks get isolated fairly quickly.

I guess I have more questions than answers. The way to respond to sexist idiots, I guess, is to call them that. Call their bluff. Their intelligence is generally producing diminishing marginal returns anyway, so it shouldn’t be difficult. Anyone who needs to add sex and sexual innuendo to a reasonable discussion obviously hasn’t much reason to start with, and can be ignored. I acknowledge the hurtfulness. I’m a sensitive plant too, and it doesn’t take much of jab to cause me to nurse my wounds, but I’ve always considered intellectual conversation above that.

I guess my question is. Is there something that is particularly of concern to women in the general subject matter of atheism and unbelief? I just don’t know. Ophelia says it’s largely a guy thing. I wouldn’t have thought that, offhand. I’d have thought the most obvious thing is that atheism itself, since it has no built in gender agenda like most religions, should be a way of second lising most traditional misogyny. Am I just wrong about that? I know, as I’ve said, that sometimes boys will be boys, and their prurience and anal fixation is bound to show, and they tend, in my experience, not to notice how really stupid they are when this happens. It shouldn’t take much more than a gentle reminder to get them either to change or to leave. And, as Ophelia says, she hasn’t been falling down on that particular job here. That’s why this is a great place to be, thoughtful, civilised and largely right.

Athena, our posts crossed. You may be right about numbers – that was my question – and the reason why not more women are involved, having resolved things for themselves and got on with things, but I think there’s room for women to get out an say what they think as strongly and as forcefully as they can. Johnson may have been surprised at a woman preaching, but it should occasion no surprise anymore. Since women tend to be better at language, the surprise is, perhaps, that they’re not doing more of it and more strongly.

Eric, let me give you a few stories about women being better with language.

When I was a kid in primary school, I got involved in an argument with a boy. We went back and forth, I pushed him verbally into a corner and at that point he said, matter-of-factly, “You have to let me win. I’m the boy.”

I laughed at him, at which point he threw a stone at me. It narrowly missed my eye. I had to have stitches in my eyebrow. He was not disciplined beyond being told not to do it again. I, on the other hand, was told to stop being provocative unless I wanted more of the same. And I’ve had more of the same since, only different in details.

I recall a poll described by Robin Morgan. Apparently, there was extensive polling of high school students at the time she was writing her book The Demon Lover. They asked girls and boys if they were afraid of the other gender and why. The boys replied “We’re afraid the girls will laugh at us.” The girls replied “We’re afraid the boys will kill us.” A slight difference, no?

When women talk too much, men start beating them — individually or collectively. It’s the ultimate way of winning an argument and, as I say in my article that Ophelia showcased on the face page of B&W, “Furniture is useful and can be decorative, but it’s not supposed to move, dammit!”

Research has proved the so-called one-third rule: women are perceived as “talking too much” when they do so more than 1/3 of the time or represent more than 1/3 of the talking sample. This holds true here, in B&W, as well. Just count the posts that are obviously gendered. The moderating influence is that the blog is owned by a woman, which gives commentators enough pause to parse their words before letting fly.

Okay, we parse our words. I don’t. I write what I think and feel. I’ve never parsed words for gender in my life, except on a few occasions in the church, where male voices were becoming less acceptable than female. I guess what I’m concerned about is the militancy. I acknowledge that situtations are often unbalanced in gender terms. I don’t have a solution to that other than vigilance, the same kind of vigilance that is necessary to preserve freedom.

A friend of mine often makes the distinction between feminine and masculine ways of thinking. Feminine ways of thinking, according to her are holistic and imagistic. Men think discursively, logically. I admit to being discursive. Some people call me a talking head. That’s fine. I don’t think gender, though, when I’m writing. I’m trying to find out what is as true as I can tell it. Who my interlocutor is doesn’t make a shadow of a difference. I do get put off my stride if people think that I’m speaking from a masculine point of view, because I don’t know what that would be like, and I think, sometimes, we set too many traps for ourselves like this, and, because we’ve set them, we get caught in them.

Yes, I suppose Ophelia is a moderating influence here. Of course she is. But except for the few times that Ophelia has sounded off – for good reason – against stupid male idiocy, I haven’t thought about her being a woman or a man. It doesn’t make a difference to the truth of what she says. (Perhaps that’s why it’s good that she writes with Jeremy Strangroom.) And by saying that I don’t want to deny your experience, Athena, of the stupid childhood stereotypes that were imposed on you. No doubt they were there. I can still recall – I’m not young – the first woman CBC newsreader. I almost ended up in the ditch! So I know there were silly stereotypes. But surely, surely – that was in the sixties – we’ve come some way beyond that. If we haven’t, there’s no hope at all.

I speak as someone who was married to a modern woman (much younger than I) who gave no quarter and asked none. She squashed more men, just like bugs, than I care to remember, but it was never held against her, because she was bright, forthright, and knew exactly who she was. Most men, as she said, did not, and their claim to precedence was all bluster. It was.

Hmmm…Sarah/KB…I think I might know what you mean by ‘that exchange’, and where it took place (rings a bell, anyway), and yes, it’s pathetic that many supposedly ‘serious’ forums seem far too quick to take on the aspect of a bunch of blokes down the pub.

Can’t stand it when people resort to “well you can eff off, you effer” style retorts, too. It’s *not* just “part of the rough and tumble” (as one guy – yeah, it was a guy) tried to justify it to me, it’s possibly even more pathetic.

Athena – this claim is a bit too simplistic, surely?

“women are perceived as “talking too much” when they do so more than 1/3 of the time or represent more than 1/3 of the talking sample. This holds true here, in B&W, as well. Just count the posts that are obviously gendered.”

Errr…pardon, but you can’t prove that about B&W simply by counting posts. You’d need to know the demographic breakdown of site visitors, viewers of the specific topic(s) posted on, etc in order to be able to compare the gendered posts to see if there is a relative under-representation.

Then there’s the question of motivation for posting on any given topic, or indeed, feeling the need to post at all…

Also, I’ve got to ask who around here is doing the discriminatory “perceiving”?

with all respect, that’s not an answer to the problem with what your statement:

“This holds true here, in B&W, as well. Just count the posts that are obviously gendered.”

that I pointed out.

As for Herring’s research (that’s the one you meant, yes?), can we really assume it applies equally across all forums, for all participants – especially here at B&W, where what people say has always seemed to matter a great deal more than who was saying it (e.g. Julian Baggiani being taken to task for illogicalities)? Again, “counting posts” certainly doesn’t prove that.

For those who leaped to their keyboards to inform me that misogyny is worse than misandry because of the human race’s history of sexism (Firefox is also sexist — it has “misogyny” in its dictionary but not “misandry”), I did include this with the original post:

“Yes, I know, I don’t get it because I’m a man, and I’m a knuckle-dragging troglodyte, and I’m oppressing women just by mentioning the fact that I don’t even know what constitutes oppressing women any more.”

Ophelia wanted to know where I was getting the notion that some of the above comments were sexist. Actually, what I said is that there were comments “that could be interpreted as sexist”. Just as, I think, some men make statements that are interpreted as sexist when it may merely be the phrasing that is poor — or the reading comprehension on the part of the audience is poor.

I could, for example, interpret this comment from Claire as being sexist:

“What if I want to read comments about the real topic or learn something? Sorry, someone w/a penis and his snickering buddies have distracted the audience.”

Because people with penises can’t take issues seriously. Or they can’t help being distracted by snickering. Or only people with penises derail threads with crude or stupid jokes. Again, I’m not saying that the statement is sexist. But I’ve seen similar statements about women interpreted as sexist before.

Here’s one from Athena:

“Most writers of blogs that the readers of B&W would visit are white (upper)middle class Anglosaxon men. That means that they have led a life of unquestioned privilege and deference. By designating themselves progressives (and being so, possibly, in a single domain), they do not see the need to question their own attitudes or those of others further. Women figure very little, if at all, in their political/philosophical agendas and making fun of them and their concerns makes them appear unshackled by “PC hysteria and rigidity”.”

Of course. It’s impossible to me both male and intellectually honest. How could I possibly interpret something like this as sexist?

Of course, all I was really doing — and I didn’t think that this was at all ambiguous — was expressing the fact that because of the variable sensitivity of women to perceived incidents of sexism, and because of the variable definitions of sexism held across the population of women, it is very difficult to see the difference between a legitimate accusation of sexism and a reactionary or knee-jerk accusation of sexism. That is, I was not saying that sexism doesn’t exist (I agree it does) or that it’s OK to be sexist as long as there are sexist women (seriously, how the hell did you get that out of my post?). I was explaining that I can’t see a clear black line between a comment that is definitively sexist and one that is merely perceived as sexist.

Myself, I can’t recall ever being accused of sexism (before this thread, anyway) and I’ve judged men and women on their individual merits since third grade when I realized that girls do not, in fact, all have cooties.

By the way, I think this is a perfect example of why some guys think it’s cool to bait women on this subject. Since it’s impossible to have a rational discussion without being called obnoxious (merely for expressing an honest opinion!), sexist, or worse, why try? If people would rather shout down someone like me who is honestly confused rather than engaging and addressing the questions or concerns I have, why should I be concerned about whether I’m perceived as sexist? I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, after all.

I’m still wondering how my original post got interpreted the way it did by so many posters. I thought I was perfectly clear that I was simply confused about how to differentiate frivolous accusations of sexism from legitimate ones. Was this really so unclear? If not, were people reacting viscerally instead of responding to what I actually said?

Andy, I believe Ophelia asked why so few women hang around atheist and related sites. My responses addressed that point directly from several angles, including absolute quantity as well as content (I admit I’ve been uncharacteristically prolific on this thread — it just so happens I’m an unwilling expert on the topic).

The Herring study is only the most recent one, and it addresses message texting exclusively. The studies about time allotted to women on any communication forum started in the late seventies. One took place at MIT and its title was, I think, The Rings of Saturn — about the ripple effect of unequal distribution. All subsequent studies converged on the finding that I summarized, which holds independent of the forum details.

Dan L, I suggest you read Virginia Woolf’s undeservedly obscure Three Guineas. Still sadly pertinent, almost seventy years after it was written.

I had read the entire thread, and yes, you are clearly an expert on this topic. I am not.

But then, you made an assertion about B&W, using what can only be described as a deeply-flawed methodology to support it.

Your other posts do not address or support that assertion. That’s all I’m saying. I’m ‘present’ on a few internet forums, and B&W is, in my experience, a very different place from the rest. Quality of argument seems to be what matters – oh, yes, there are sporadic ‘trolls’, but…

“All subsequent studies converged on the finding that I summarized, which holds independent of the forum details.”

Fair enough, I have not the time or access to details to begin questioning that, but I’d be interested to hear OB’s rather more knowledgeable opinion on whether B&W fits the pattern?

” I was explaining that I can’t see a clear black line between a comment that is definitively sexist and one that is merely perceived as sexist.”

If you want clear black lines, stick to coloring books – the real world just doesn’t work that way.

On a more serious not, if you want to know what’s sexist, and what not, listen first and foremost to the women who are at the receiving end of it. They’re the experts. Your first assumption should be that they might have a point, not that their complaints are frivolous.

But you also can’t expect women to want to explain the same things over and over again to people like you either. You’re a big boy, you can be expected to do your own homework by now.

And if you really want to understand why people didn’t respond favorably to your first post, let me analyze it for you – or, in this case, ruthlessly tear it apart.

You start off with an accusation of a double standard. Accusations make lousy starts of a comment, especially on a sensitive topic. It puts into question all your further intentions with your post, whatever they might be.

Second, you point out that you brush off sexism against men all the time, implying women should do the same. Didn’t it occur to you that maybe it is you who should speak up more against misandry, not that women should speak up less against misogyny?

When you say that some women so often have made frivolous claims of sexism that you’ve now lost perspective on the issue, you lay the blame for your inadequacy squarely with women.

Your remark that you wouldn’t get it because you’re a man was probably meant as a lighthearted joke, but it’s actually a bit more subversive than that. As a joke, it plays on the stereotype of feminist women as man-haters, so don’t expect feminists to laugh at it. On top of that, it sets up a defense, where you can now accuse any opposition of misandry. Which you appear to be doing in your second post, I might add.

Sure, you can think I am nitpicking about something that was clearly supposed to be a joke. But if that was going to be your reaction when reading my comment, then you clearly still in defensive mode, not in learning mode. Think again.

And your final paragraph is exactly an instance of Athena’s point three that I’ll quote here:

“3. My wife/girlfriend/mistress/concubine is a feminist and/or non-white and she agrees with me.”

Your second post isn’t much better. You complain about how mean the responses were, and how undeserved that was. After all, you were “merely expressing your confusion”, as you say. But what did you intend to accomplish with that? You never expressed your desire to learn, in either comment, but you did offer all sorts of reasons why women are to blame for your confusion – and that women are sexist themselves to boot.

From that, I can only conclude that your reasons for expressing your confusion were not constructive, but rather passing judgment under the guise of a “reasonable question”.

If, after all this, you still don’t quite understand why people didn’t applaud you for your comment, I don’t think I can teach you anything anymore.

Couldn’t it just be that more men than women post on atheists’ sites because women are still busy, not only earning money, but with more than their share of the housework, the childcare, caring for their elderly parents, etc.? That is, women have less spare-time than men to engage in debates on internet. I bet that one would find fewer women debating politics or architecture all day in internet too, for precisely the same reasons.

While much of your criticism of Dan’s post is fair (at points it really does come off as sarcastic and backhanded, rather than a genuine request for clarification), I can’t help but feel that some of what he says has some weight to it. The examples of anti-male sexist language in this thread he cites really would be plainly sexist if the genders were reversed. And as we’ve seen from the debates over religion, the fact that any individual reader is offended by a statement is not always a good measure of whether the statement belongs in civil conversation. That’s not to say that (as has been brought up before) women should “just get over it” – there really are things that don’t belong in civil discussion – but to dismiss the point with so little discussion concerns me. In general, the responses to Dan’s posts (especially yours) have been much more negative, and much less assuming of good intent, than we really should be aiming for. B&W really does have some great discussions, and I’d like to see them stay that way.

Jeez, great timing – I’d been on the computer about 20 minutes this morning and was just reading my email when the power went out (a planned outage but the planners forgot to tell anyone, though they’re claiming they did tell us – the whole neighborhood is fuming) – then I had to go out for the afternoon. So I’ve missed an interesting discussion.

Athena, Andy’s right, I do take exception to this –

“women are perceived as “talking too much” when they do so more than 1/3 of the time or represent more than 1/3 of the talking sample. This holds true here, in B&W, as well.”

Has anybody here on B&W ever said that women are talking too much? It would be odd if anyone did, because from one point of view I do all the talking!

“I was explaining that I can’t see a clear black line between a comment that is definitively sexist and one that is merely perceived as sexist…I thought I was perfectly clear that I was simply confused about how to differentiate frivolous accusations of sexism from legitimate ones. Was this really so unclear?”

It’s not quite that simple – you didn’t just express confusion, you accused me (or us) of a double standard. And then…frankly, why bring it up in this context? Bringing it up in this context looks like not mere confusion but accusing me of making a fuss about nothing. In other words it’s just a tad rude. Of course it’s not just self-evident that anything anyone says is sexist is in fact sexist – but for the purposes of this discussion you would have done better to, for instance, ask me what was said before oh so innocently asking how one knows what is sexist and what isn’t. Or you could even have given me the benefit of the doubt. Or you could have decided to save the general discussion of What Is Sexist for another time, in order not to impugn my ability to see what’s in front of my nose. In other words to be brutally frank you kind of picked a fight, so it’s a little disingenuous to be indignant about the response.

Dan, I often share your confusion at the niceties of unwritten laws, as I think there is a moral duty to demand explicitness. I crafted my post in reply to you specific intending to be rhetorically neutral. I wanted to respond to your concern on the basis of the issues involved, which do require a couple of mental turns to make. But I can’t help but notice that instead of concentrating on whatever moral intuitions you want to expound upon, or pursuing the rationales behind the rebuttals on offer, you’re instead going after barbed remarks made by Athena and Claire.

Perhaps, if you do indeed find this issue troublesome, you might do better (if I may be frank) by reading, comprehending, and then responding to the ethical issues that are alive. CW, for instance, made some remarks that (when properly understood) can be used in such a way that they are sympathetic to your position. I don’t doubt that that would be an interesting discussion to have. But I should note that CW has hardly been trounced upon for making their remarks. What might account for the different quality of the reactions, between your post and CW’s?

Also, Dan – the disclaimer about knowing you’re a troglodyte etc etc is not really a disclaimer at all – it’s more fight-picking. The tone of your post was really quite chippy. I thought that was intentional, but you now seem unaware of that. Take a look; think about it. It looked like classic passive-aggressive anti-feminist whining, frankly, and I don’t think people here are at fault for reading it that way. You wrote it that way, perhaps without meaning to.

Let’s do it by number of posts. 57 posts by people who could be classified by gender. 37 were by men. 20 by women — again, just above 1/3.

Obviously, the arithmetic is right and there’s no disputing it. It still leaves me wondering about the explanation. Several women here (OB, JuliaF, Jenavir, Athena) have given insight into some of the reasons women avoid atheist forums. But we’re still left with a mystery, since B&W is not the sort of place where vulgar machismo goes unchallenged, yet there’s still a disparity in comments by sex.

Sorry about my formatting fail in the last post – the first paragraph quotes Athena.

Only very slightly off topic – I was recently corresponding with a moderator of a high-traffic atheist site. He and I were discussing some really supremely unpleasant, belligerent trolls derailing threads with pointless, relentless provocation, and what to do about them.

He made the off-hand remark that he always imagines this particular sort of troll to be a guy, and I confessed I did too. It’s very hard to put into explicit, clear words, but there’s a certain kind of swaggering, inappropriate, irrelevant, one-ups-manship kind of trolling that just smells like . . . a guy. I’m not talking about comments having anything to do with sex or gender, and I am talking about commenters whose names don’t betray their sex.

Based on my own experience of this kind of behavior when you can tell a commenter’s sex by his or her handle, this pattern seems to hold up. But, it’s perfectly possible this is just confirmation bias on my part, that I’m looking to confirm a prejudice. So, I’m curious:

1. Does anyone else observe anything like this?

2. Can anyone think of a way to construct a study, even hypothetically, that would test this idea? I confess I can’t. How in the world would you determine the sex of an anonymous commenter with a handle that betrays nothing about their sex? Seems hopeless.

Ophelia: The fact that you asked the question before I did about whether women are too busy to post in atheist forums with the same intensity of males isn’t evidence either against or in favor of said hypothesis.

More off topic, but perhaps not so, when crossing the street where there’s no stop light, if there’s a woman driver waiting to turn (the pedestrian, that is, me, theoretically has the right of way), I always cross confidently, but if it’s a male driver, I look at his face to see if he’s likely to throw his car on top of me out of rage. The list is long. All the cases I know of where someone walks into a school or fast-food restaurant with

I wonder if the imbalance arises more from a gendered PURPOSE of communication. A percentage of males (obviously not all or at all times) have a conversational purpose based in a competitive mindset and try to show themselves better, knowledgable, cleverer, stronger, whateverer than others. The level varies from benign to severely obnoxious, but is perhaps in some people inversely proportional to perceived security of social status.

I don’t think women’s conversations work this aspect in the same way as men, and women in mixed company do not prefer to engage with men in this mode.

Unfortunately for the rational, internet conversations do not have an easy equivalent of the body language that groups in person use to dampen inappropriate behaviour.

Brian Dunning over at skepticblog.org recently had a pretty interesting blog post where he was thinking out loud about the same issue for the skeptics movement. His hypothesis in short: since the skeptics movement is mostly an online phenomenon, or at least started as such, it seems logical that it is dominated by software engineers, who, for whatever reason, appear to be very male dominated. Read the whole thing.

A percentage of males (obviously not all or at all times) have a conversational purpose based in a competitive mindset and try to show themselves better, knowledgable, cleverer, stronger, whateverer than others.

From personal experience, and from having studied psychology, I’d say this is a fair comment. Men, not all, are status seeking, variously aggressive beasts. I certainly to some extent, though I try to be reasonable, without great success. But I’ve been called a “girl with a dick” because I demure often and don’t like bullying or demeaning people because of their skin colour or sex and will argue against that. You probably will never have to suffer the types who called me that, this would not be their type of site. :)

… I would add, tho’, that while there’s a fair point being made here that you could interpret comments about ‘fuckability’ as minimizing the barmaid’s intellectual dimensions, the specific comment was about J and M’s interest, and in fairness, both of those characters certainly have on several occasions expressed some physical attraction to her. See the burka sequence, especially. I found a few pretty easily–‘pump’, ‘fair’, ‘grief’, ‘baby’ came up in a quick search of transcripts…

Mind you, as to J and M’s sexual interests, there’s also a lot of stuff you could interpret as veiled desire for *each other*, as well…

My general interpretation is: those boys are generally portrayed as not picky after a few Guinness, anyway, and the whole burka thing really was just too beautiful a way to portray the silliness of the whole proposition, so commenting just on their interest in her *is* picking one thing out of the mix a bit speciously in any case, with or without distinct overtones of sexism.

“The fact that you asked the question before I did about whether women are too busy to post in atheist forums with the same intensity of males isn’t evidence either against or in favor of said hypothesis.”

No kidding, and I didn’t say it was, but what is the point of suggesting an explanation as if de novo when it has already been made in the post?

AJ, hmmm…Yeah, maybe, but then it was a total change of subject in this instance, and it’s a change of subject that happens over and over again there. It’s a pattern. The pattern is a bad pattern. As Eric put it, “To reduce that penetrating mind simply to body is really offensive.”

Ophelia: You caught me. During this long and fruitful conversation, I forgot that you had mentioned that women are often busier than men in your original post. Lesson: Reread the original post from time to time during long threads.

And they have to bring their mothers, girlfriends and mother-in-laws into the sexist equation, thinking they are being really funny to boot. Most men who knock women, in my estimation, have “mother” issues.

“In other words to be brutally frank you kind of picked a fight, so it’s a little disingenuous to be indignant about the response.”

I don’t think that’s fair: my reading was that he was responding to some of the commenters here, not to your original article. And I don’t think he was wrong about those. The comments from Claire and Athena really could have been interpreted as sexist, as he describes. You might fairly describe his tone as off, but I don’t think his point can be dismissed quite so easily.

Perhaps I should keep my head down, but I must confess I suffer some of the confusions he refers to, and I’d welcome the clarifications he asked for too.

For the avoidance of doubt: I’m here to learn, not pick a fight. Other than OB my all-time favourite internet poster is the much-missed Potentilla, and this is one of my favourite quotes of hers:

“I have absolutely no interest in the silly little concerns of one-upmanship which indeed characterise much internet debate; [snip her illness, not applicable to me]. I am – really – just interested in learning more about the truth.”

It hasn’t always been true, and my nature pushes me the wrong way at times. But it’s what I aim to live up to. Please help me become better informed.

I don’t think I understand this: the original comment was that women are perceived as talking too much when taking up more than a 1/3 of the conversation. Are you suggesting that the count of posts in some ways supports that assertion? If so, it’s not immediately obvious that this is the case.

I don’t disagree that there is (of course) often room for disagreement and interpretation about what constitutes sexism – but there are also more and less truculent ways of asking about that, and so on.

OwenP: I really don’t see what Athena said that was sexist, other than commenting on the factual existence of upper-middle-class male privilege. This is a phenomenon that has been documented over and over again, for which there are mountains of evidence. If you think pointing out the existence of white male upper-class privilege is sexist, then every feminist and abolitionist and anti-racist in the history of the world is a horrible bigot. I doubt you would seriously argue that. Taking that argument seriously would effectively kill all feminist activism.

As for Claire’s comment, please. It’s very clear that she was talking about sexist males disrupting serious discussions with their bigotry:

What if I want to read comments about the real topic or learn something? Sorry, someone w/a penis and his snickering buddies have distracted the audience

To interpret this as saying nobody with a penis can have a serious discussion about the real topic is a HUGE stretch. Claire was talking about the regrettable tendency of SOME people with penises to band together and snicker at female participants rather than engaging with them seriously. Again, to take this as sexism would be to shut down all discussion of male bad behavior. This kills any attempt at raising feminist awareness.

I should clarify that, while I was responding to OwenP, it was originally Dan L. who complained about Claire’s and Athena’s so-called sexism. Owen did not suggest that Claire said men can’t have serious discussions. Dan L. did.

Jenavir says: “I really don’t see what Athena said that was sexist, other than commenting on the factual existence of upper-middle-class male privilege.”

There is a problem here: no-one says it *was* sexist (i.e. that Athena was behaving in a sexist manner), but that it could be *perceived* as being sexist, and better phrasing would have removed that possibility.

From Athena: “Most writers of blogs that the readers of B&W would visit are white (upper)middle class Anglosaxon men. That means that they have led a life of unquestioned privilege and deference. By designating themselves progressives (and being so, possibly, in a single domain), they do not see the need to question their own attitudes or those of others further. Women figure very little, if at all, in their political/philosophical agendas and making fun of them and their concerns makes them appear unshackled by “PC hysteria and rigidity”.”

Whatever Athena meant to imply (which I assume was not deliberately sexist), the words she actually used are fairly unequivocal: the men who write the blogs B&W readers visit “do not see the need to question their own attitudes [and] making fun of [women] and their concerns makes them appear unshackled [etc]”. Not “some of the men”, or “many of the men”, but “the men”. A small change in wording perhaps, but quite a large change in meaning.

This goes beyond merely *recognising* male-privilege, and accuses all such men of behaving the same way (whether the author originally intended it or not). Surely you can see that this phrasing is, at the least, unhelpful?